Talking Points (Season 17, Episode 13)
Premise: A sophomore is killed when protesters rush a conservative commentator’s campus lecture, and prosecutors must prove the gunman was really aiming at the speaker.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 17, Episode 13
- Detectives
- Det. Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin), Det. Nina Cassady (Milena Govich)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza), DA Arthur Branch (Fred Dalton Thompson)
- Guest stars
- Charlotte Ross as Judith Barlow, Ron Silver as defense attorney Bernie Adler, Louis Cancelmi as Malcolm Yates, Peter Hans Benson as Kevin Gray, Emma Bell as Kirsten Paley
- Director
- Matthew Penn
- Writers
- Michael S. Chernuchin
Summary
The Investigation
“Talking Points” begins at a college lecture by conservative commentator Judith Barlow, where a gunshot fired as protesters surge toward the stage kills sophomore Jason Miles. Barlow’s bodyguards carry .38s, but the fatal bullet is a .45. Jason’s girlfriend, Kirsten, and his mentor, graduate student Malcolm Yates, say they were waiting for him at Yates’s apartment with pizza and a Knicks game. Professor Kevin Gray, who organized the protest, tells the detectives the wrong person died.
A video of an earlier campus march shows Jason beating Danny O’Toole, an evangelical student, but Danny was serving at a soup kitchen. His pastor explains that Kirsten talked them out of pressing charges in exchange for Jason volunteering there on Tuesday and Friday nights, and that she came in alone that evening, saying Jason was ill. A labmate says Yates is no ladies’ man and spends his time creating human embryos for stem-cell research, and the cable company cut off Yates’s service months before the game he claims to have watched. A search finds .45 rounds hidden in his medicine cabinet.
Van Buren brings Barlow into the interview room, and when the pundit derides stem-cell research as a fraud, Yates erupts that she should have been the one to die. He is arrested.
The Trial
Defense attorney Bernie Adler suggests police planted the ammunition, while McCoy relies on transferred intent: Yates aimed at Barlow and killed Jason instead. Rubirosa learns that Yates was about to lose his lab job because a foundation pulled its funding after Barlow attacked its board on cable TV, but the judge excludes that motive without proof Yates knew of it. Branch urges McCoy to keep the divisive Barlow off the stand. Rubirosa then finds that Yates has Parkinson’s disease, giving him a personal stake in the research Barlow opposes.
Yates comes to court off his medication and trembling, and the judge refuses a mistrial. Adler opens by hurling ethnic slurs at the jurors to show how hateful words provoke, argues extreme emotional distress, and calls Barlow, who admits using a slur for Michael J. Fox in her lecture. Yates testifies that he only wanted to frighten her and that his tremor made the gun go off. McCoy shows he had taken his medication that day in order to work in the lab.
Spoiler, the ending: The judge declines to let the jury consider manslaughter, and Yates is convicted of second-degree murder. Afterward, Rubirosa keeps pressing McCoy for his own view on stem-cell research.
Why it stands out
- Branch, a conservative himself, spars with Barlow over a scotch, telling her that her insults drown out the arguments she shares with him.
- Ron Silver plays defense attorney Bernie Adler, who opens his case by addressing the jury with slurs to dramatize the effect of hate speech.
- The conviction rests on transferred intent: Yates is found guilty of murdering a bystander while trying to kill someone else.